Hurricane Heist Review

I can see the pitch now: “What two kinds of movies do people love? Heist movies! And natural disaster movies!”

“Uh huh…sure.”

“So what if we combined the them…? Like, a cross between Twister, and The Italian Job and Fast and Furious? And we’ll even got Rob Cohen, the guy that created and directed The Fast and the Furious to direct!” (and Dragonheart, and xXx, The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, etc.)

GREEN LIGHT!

Oh, but wait – we’ll get the guys that wrote Drop Dead Fred to write it, along with a couple guys that have written terrible unknown C and D action films. And one of them has only ever been a producer of EXERCISE videos.

Well, they’ll work for a lot less than anyone with any real credits to their name…What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

This isn’t a film with a great deal of subtext. Pretty much everything you need to know is in the title.

A group of thieves attempt a massive heist against the U.S. Treasury as a Category 5 hurricane approaches on of its’ Mint facilities.

There’s no rel build-up here. We get a sequence of two brothers (Will and Breeze) as kids with their dad trying to get out of town during a hurricane and tragedy strikes. Yeas later – present day – we see what the two brothers are up to, and of course one of them is a meteorologist chasing hurricanes, and the other (named Breeze – really?) runs the mechanics/general fix-it shop their dad ran. And there’s a hurricane enroute. And the “high-tech science” guys think it won’t be a big deal.

But meteoroloigst brother, Will (Tony Kebbel), thinks it will be the biggest damn hurricane they’ve ever seen!

While that’s being exlained, we see Casey (Maggie Grace) and her partner working in the ATF delivering three semi’s full of money back to the Mint where they work. It all has to be shredded, but DAMN! the shredder has been broken for days!

Yes, a big plan has been set in motion to steal all this money – $ 600 million – by a bunch of people that pretty much includes everyone in any official law enforcement position except this Casey and the two brothers from the opening scene.

It’s good that they get right to the action, but the dialogue is awful – and not even over-the-top awful, which would have made this more fun, like the Fast and Furious films. This is just dull. there are some delightfully insane moments where they disregard physics and logic, which is what I was hoping for, frankly. I mean, 90 % of the film takes place during a Cat 5 hurricane, and crazy shit can happen in that. But apparently even though automobiles are being lifted of the ground by strong winds, humans are somehow glued to the ground and able to move just by holding onto the nearest object.

This film all takes place in southern Alabama, so there are a LOT of southern accents at play here. And many of them are pretty obviously fake. Sometimes it feels like you’re listening to a bunch of drunk people that are making fun of southerners. I mean, come on, actor Ben Cross plays the sheriff and it’s just like he’s doing a character from the show Mama’s Family with Vicki Lawrence.

The hurricane effects are sorta cool, and the final sequence of the trucks racing against the hurricane wall is sort of exciting, but believe it or not, this film isn’t quite over-the-top enough to be fun. It’s missing what the Fast and Furious films have: bad writing that ‘s good.

I know how that sounds, but you know what i mean, right? If you’re going to make a film this absurd, don’t hold back. Go in 110 %. sure, there’s dumb dialogue here, but I expect to laugh at just about every scene because of the massive amounts of cheese. You know, like the Fast and Furious movies.

But Hurricane Heist doesn’t go far enough. It has scenes that seem to take themselves too seriously. It ends up falling flat for the most part. Maybe two kittenhands. This was a wasted opportunity to be a really stupid but FUN movie, that only got the stupid part right.

Author: Neil Weakley

Hi. I'm Neil. I didn't go to film school so I don't really have to justify any of my opinions about why I like a film or not. So there. But I worked in film for a number of years, so I have hands-on experience. That, and I've known Chris Mancini for, like, 25 years or so. It really is all who you know. :)
I'm mostly, but not exclusively, a fan of sci-fi, comic book movies, horror, comedies, and weird independent films. If you're an average movie-goer and want to know what another average movie-goer thinks without all the "feelm school" gobbley-gook, hop on over to www.comedyfilmnerds.com and look for me, Neil T. Weakley. I won't steer you wrong. Or follow me on Twitter @FilmNerdNeil.